⚠️ Content Note: This episode includes discussion of religious deconstruction, trauma, addiction, and inner child healing.
This week on The Awakening, Tamara and I sit down with David Deane Haskell — author, storyteller, and someone who has spent a lifetime learning how to tell the truth about what happened to him.
David writes across two very different worlds — speculative science fiction that explores systems of control, power, and consequence, and raw, deeply personal memoir about trauma, addiction, and healing. But at the center of both is the same question: what does it cost us when systems demand appearance over truth?
His healing memoir Wounded Angels is the book behind the fiction — the story he had to write before anything else could be written. After forty years buried under trauma and grief, cycling through creativity and addiction trying to escape, David found a path forward through inner child work, introducing the many suppressed parts of himself and watching them heal each other in real time. A revised edition is in the works, and in this conversation he gives us a glimpse of what that revision holds and why he felt called to return to it.
We also get into his deconstruction story — what it looked like, what it cost, and what it opened up on the other side.
This is a conversation about the courage it takes to stop performing and start healing.
In This Episode, We Discuss:
• David's personal deconstruction journey
• Forty years of trauma, grief, and the path through it
• Inner child work as a tool for healing and recovery
• Wounded Angels — what the book is and why he wrote it
• The upcoming revision and what's new in it
• Writing speculative fiction as a way of telling the truth about control and power
• What hopeful futures require of us first
David's Books:
📖 Wounded Angels (healing memoir): https://mybook.to/woundedangels
📖 The Solarian Deep (sci-fi novel): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GPN8DBJS
📖 Emergence (free standalone novel): https://dl.bookfunnel.com/k7osg3nq37
Connect with David Deane Haskell:
🌐 Website: https://daviddeanehaskell.com
Connect with Your Hosts:
Heather: https://linktr.ee/Happyheathersmiles
Tamara: TikTok @feralatheistjezebel321 | Instagram @tamarajo321
🎥 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheAwakeningPodcast-w6s
📩 Be a guest: [email protected]
If you've spent decades carrying something you were never meant to carry alone — David's story is proof that it is never too late to put it down and pick up something true. Healing is not linear and it is not tidy. But it is possible. You belong here.
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